Quotes About Wisdom And Experience

“Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.”

— David Bentley Hart

“The value of experience, real or imagined, is that is shows us how to - or how NOT to - live. In reading about different characters and the consequences of their choices, I was finding myself changed. I was discovering new and distinct ways of undergoing life's sorrows and joys ...
and all the great books I was reading - were about the complexity and entirety of the human experience. About the things we wish to forget and those we want more and more of. About how we react and how we wish we could react. Books ARE experience, the words of authors proving the solace of love, the fulfillment of family, the torment of war, and the wisdom of memory. Joy and tears, pleasure and pain: everything came to me while I read in my purple chair. i had never sat so still, and yet experienced so much.”

— Nina Sankovitch

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.”

— Alexandre Dumas

“I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals”

— Brigitte Bardot

“Reflection is time sensitive; and with the realization that the 'present' and 'future' can be altered, it is also purposeful, for we can set goals to grow into a graceful work of art. Reflection is deliberate and purposeful. It is our past that provides us the wisdom and experience when to bloom and show everyone I am a beautiful flower.”

— Patricia H. Graham

“We are only able to get into the possession of Wisdom and get closer to Truth when and if we realize that all the knowledge and experience concentrated in the mind only hamper us in our awakening to Truth.”

— Frank M. Wanderer

“The curse of mortality. You spend the first portion of your life learning, growing stronger, more capable. And then, through no fault of your own, your body begins to fail. You regress. Strong limbs become feeble, keen senses grow dull, hardy constitutions deteriorate. Beauty withers. Organs quit. You remember yourself in your prime, and wonder where that person went. As your wisdom and experience are peaking, your traitorous body becomes a prison.”

— Brandon Mull

“Two things happen when you get to be old. One, you gather experience and knowledge. You learn from your mistakes, and thereby offer wisdom to others. The second thing that happens is that you grow forgetful, ornery and senile, and when you offer advice, well, you sometimes just don't know what you're talking about. Often it's hard for everyone-including me-to know the difference.”

— Camron Wright

“Other priests, he knew, found an intense pleasure in the raw, salty dialect of peasant conversation. They picked up pearls of wisdom and experience over a farmhouse table or a cup of wine in a workingman's kitchen. They talked with equal familiarity to the rough-tongued whores of Trastevere and the polished signori of Parioli. They enjoyed the ribald humor of the fish market as much as the wit of a Cardinal's dinner table. They were good priests too, and they did much good for their people, with a singular satisfaction to themselves.”

— Morris L. West

“You see? This is what's wrong with the world. A young lady with bleached hair, an estuarine accent and unfeasible breasts can outsell a respected expert with decades of wisdom and experience."
"She's human interest," replied May.. "You're not. People reading her story will feel that if she can make it without talent, maybe they can.”

— Christopher Fowler

“Among those dazzled by the Administration team was Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next, and that the smartest of them all was that fellow with the Stacomb on his hair from the Ford Motor Company, McNamara. "Well, Lyndon," Mister Sam answered, "you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once." It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal fluency which the team exuded, and the true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.”

— David Halberstam

“There's a beauty to wisdom and experience that cannot be faked. It's impossible to be mature without having lived.”

— Amy Grant

“R2-D2 [aside:]-Almost I could My metal tongue release and speak to him. This man doth show sure signs of wisdom and Experience. [To Obi-Wan:] Beep, beep, meep, beep, meep, squeak.”

— Ian Doescher

“A musical, like most religions, provides the audience or followers with a sense of belonging. Religious services, on the other hand, with their staged performances, invigorating songs, popular wisdom and shared experience, are almost a form of community theater.”

— Lisa Randall

“How would you create a fortune?' and the first step would be to serve others. I would put myself in a position, by serving others, to be around people who could help me, guide me, and share their wisdom and experience with me.”

— Andy Andrews

“My past is my wisdom to use today ... my future is my wisdom yet to experience. Be in the present because that is where life resides.”

— Gene Oliver

“The desire to make the horse happy and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a bizarre longing to take them to bed with him.  And that, he knew, was impossible.  For Stevie was not mad.  It was, as it were, a symbolic longing; and at the same time it was very distinct, because springing from experience, the mother of wisdom.  Thus when as a child he cowered in a dark corner scared, wretched, sore, and miserable with the black, black misery of the soul, his sister Winnie used to come along, and carry him off to bed with her, as into a heaven of consoling peace.  Stevie, though apt to forget mere facts, such as his name and address for instance, had a faithful memory of sensations.  To be taken into a bed of compassion was the supreme remedy, with the only one disadvantage of being difficult of application on a large scale.  And looking at the cabman, Stevie perceived this clearly, because he was reasonable.”

— Joseph Conrad

“There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.”

— Confucius

“The wisdom and experience of older people is a resource of inestimable worth. Recognizing and treasuring the contributions of older people is essential to the long-term flourishing of any society.”

— Daisaku Ikeda

“Wisdom may be rented ... on the experience of other people, but we buy it at an inordinate price before we make it our own forever.”

— Robertson Davies

“This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.”

— Margaret Atwood

“Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.”

— H.L. Mencken

“Mr. Tracy Tupman-the too susceptible Tupman, who to the wisdom and experience of maturer years superadded the enthusiasm and ardour of a boy in the most interesting and pardonable of human weaknesses-love.”

— Charles Dickens

“Maybe that was the only real truth about the world, that there was no answer, that wisdom and experience were no better than a flat-out roll of the dice.”

— Janet Fitch

“Spend time reflecting on your emotional and physical existence and how that applies to the voice. You have to apply that wisdom and experience when you sing - it's what comes through.”

— K.d. Lang

“Youth would be too happy, might it add to its own beauty and felicity the wisdom and experience of riper years. Were it possible for it to realize the worth of time, as life's receding hours reveal it, how rapidly would it press on towards perfection!”

— Lydia Sigourney

“The art of speaking," it was later said, "depends on much effort, continual study, varied kinds of exercise, long experience, profound wisdom, and unfailing strategic sense.”

— Stacy Schiff

“One of the great blessings of the plan is that we are organized into families. You have parents whose greater wisdom and experience will help you reach your divine potential. Trust them. They want the best for you.”

— Mary N. Cook

“Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Just learn from the guys who have already done it well. You need a mentor, a seasoned coach who is willing to share his wisdom and experience with you. Ask someone who has already been successful to guide you.”

— George Foreman

“There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.”

— Ben Horowitz

“Liberal hostility to the traditional family helped to undermine centuries of accumulated wisdom and experience about what was best for children and adults. Far from benefiting only men, marriage confers enormous advantages on women and children as well - a fact that has been thrown into sharp relief by its breakdown over the past forty years.”

— Mona Charen

“At age fourteen I was asking questions. When the answers failed to satisfy me, I searched elsewhere for different answers and found wisdom in atheism. And I am far from alone in that experience.”

— Hemant Mehta

“Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.”

— Stanley Kunitz

“President Wilford Woodruff is a man of wisdom and experience, and we respect and venerate him, but we do not believe his personal views or utterances are revelations from God; and when Thus saith the Lord, comes from him, the saints investigate it: they do not shut their eyes and take it down like a pill.”

— Charles W. Penrose

“I was a long time learning that wisdom and experience are things apart; that to taste life is not to be confused with understanding what life is really all about.”

— Wallis Simpson

“All this was mine; but I was a long time learning that wisdom and experience are things apart; that to taste life is not to be confused with understanding what life is really all about. The shared experiences, the wisdom so freely proffered by others, in words and in example, rarely swayed me for long. Came another day and the import was gone, and only the echo of the laughter remained. Experience was a revolving sun in the warmth of which I was content to bask.”

— Wallis Simpson

“To have lived long does not necessarily imply the gathering of much wisdom and experience. One who has pedaled twenty-five thousand miles on a stationary bicycle has not circled the globe. He or she has only garnered weariness.”

— Paul Eldridge

“To assault the total culture totally is to be free to use all the fruits of mankind's wisdom and experience without the rotten structure in which these glories are encased and encrusted.”

— Judith Malina

“The man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be ... The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough.”

— Adam Smith

“The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.”

— Samuel Johnson

“One of the primary conditions for suffering is denial. Shutting our mind to pain, whether in ourselves or others, only ensures that it will continue. We must have the strength to face it without turning away. By opening to the pain we see around us with wisdom and compassion, we start to experience the intimate connection of our relationship with all beings.”

— Sharon Salzberg

“No experience in this world has ever been cathartic without the willing participation of the individual. Life does not automatically bestow wisdom or growth upon anyone just for showing up.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“Wisdom is the most-sought intellectual degree whose subjects are regularly learned throughout life with an open mind in an open university called life and taught by a teacher who is none other than self-experience only.”

— Anuj

“Some souls seek to walk in awareness. Souls who walk in awareness choose a different path. They seek to experience all the peace and joy, limitlessness and freedom, wisdom and love that Oneness brings.”

— Neale Donald Walsch

“The world breaks everyone or nearly everyone, of their childish illusions, assumptions and wishes, often painfully and afterwards due to the personal growth in practical experience, insight and the resulting wisdom many are strong at the broken places just like mended broken bones often are, and some people even have the great insight to be grateful for the purifying fire.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Young people, your parents, with their maturity of years and experience you have not had, can provide wisdom, knowledge, and blessings to help you over life's pitfalls. You may find, that life's sweetest experiences come when you go to Mom and Dad for help.”

— Ezra Taft Benson

“Experience is not the only point, judgment is. And once again, back in 2002, when we both [with Hillary Clinton]looked at the same evidence about the wisdom of the war in Iraq, one of us voted the right way and one of us didn't.”

— Bernie Sanders

“Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience
a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth.”

— Lord Acton

“There's nothing good about getting older-absolutely nothing-because the amount of wisdom and experience you gain is negligible compared to what you lose. You do gain a couple of things-you gain a little bittersweet and sour wisdom from your heartbreaks and failures and things-but what you lose is so catastrophic in every way.”

— Woody Allen

“The wisdom that comes from having experienced heartbreak cannot be bequeathed; it can only be gained through experience. And having truly felt it, we are far more likely to have compassion for others. Anything that takes us close to true compassion takes us closer to what will one day be an experience of even greater joy.”

— Marianne Williamson